[tab:works] [tab:Fifty bees project] Lydia Needle is a textile and mixed media artist from Somerset. She works with a range of found, salvaged and beach-combed materials combined with wool but it is always the wool itself that inspires her practice. All of her work has an emphasis on the environment and sustainability and Lydia’s current major creative project is called, ‘FIFTY BEES: The Interconnectedness of All Things’, devised to showcase the plight of the British bee.
The FIFTY BEES project began because she came to realise how very ignorant she was about bees, despite her lifelong interest in the natural world. Lydia’s primary focus throughout the project is to research and to learn as much as possible about our bees.
“I sculpt small, individual art pieces from wool and thread inside a range of wonderful vintage containers; so far there are 100 sculptures but I am aiming to complete 275, one for each of Britain’s species of bee. The containers are a vitally important part of the FIFTY BEES project. Not only are they the frames for the artwork but they are also like characters in the story so they have to talk to me and I have to fall in love with them a little bit in order to be inspired to work into them, to transform them into something new and unique. The size, shape, sound, touch and, sometimes, even the smell of a container helps me to decide what creature to build inside.”
For each of the FIFTY BEES artworks, another fifty artists, makers, writers and musicians produce one new work in response to one of Lydia’s bee pieces, in order to give a fuller illustration of the diversity of our bee population, how endangered it is and how our pollinators are completely interlinked with our ecosystem.

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